The Shared Data Contract: Why Master Data Is Epic Zero
Every cross-unit ambition an enterprise has a unified customer view, coordinated selling, trustworthy reporting, anything with "AI" attached. It rests on one agreement that usually does not exist: agreement on who the customer actually is. That agreement is the real first deliverable, and almost no one funds it first.
Ask a large, multi-division enterprise a deceptively simple question: how many customers do you have?, and watch the answer fall apart. The same account turns up again and again...